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EY failed to expose wirecard.

 EY came close to dis­cov­er­ing fraud at the heart of Wir­e­card in 2016 when the col­lapsed pay­ments

Wirecard

firm’s trustee in Singa­pore acci­dent­ally told the aud­itor the truth, stat­ing he did not hold any money on its behalf. At the time, Wir­e­card’s accounts stated that Cit­adelle Cor­por­ate Ser­vices in Singa­pore over­saw escrow accounts in Asia that held about €150mn in cash. By June 2020, the amount in those accounts had sup­posedly risen to €1.9bn, when Wir­e­card dis­closed the money did not exist. Wir­e­card man­agers rushed to come up with an explan­a­tion for the state­ment by the trustee, who later con­firmed to EY that he did hold the cash, said people famil­iar with the details.

The firm, which audited Wir­e­card for almost a dec­ade, has been cri­ti­cised for fail­ing to request doc­u­ments dir­ectly from OCBC, the Singa­pore bank where the trustee accounts were said to be held. In late March, Rajar­at­nam told the aud­itor in writ­ing that «as of 31st of Decem­ber 2015, there were no mon­ies of Wir­e­card AG or any of its sub­si­di­ar­ies being held by us in our accounts». In an email on March 29 2016, presen­ted by crim­inal pro­sec­utors at the Wir­e­card trial in Munich last week, EY asked Wir­e­card to «cla­rify the mat­ter». Bel­len­haus told a panel of five judges that Stephan von Erffa, Wir­e­card’s head of account­ing, was asked to resolve the prob­lem.

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  1. Max31 January 2023 at 13:40

    Didn't do much. EY intentionally or unintentionally dropped the ball of this one. They should have raised the alarm as soon as questions started arising.

    ReplyDelete

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